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>> Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Maybe what these results [of a Gallup poll asking "Suppose Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2016. In your view, what would be the best or most positive thing about a Hillary Clinton presidency?", published March 21st] really illuminate is how thoughtless
Americans can be about politics. A combined grand total of 16 percent of
Americans balk at specific Clintonian policies rather than her vague
“lack of qualifications.” Likewise, just 13 percent of respondents said
they were rooting for Hillary because of her stance on a particular
issue, such as health care or immigration. Read this aside from the
researchers (and weep):

A little less than half of Americans did not give a
substantive answer in response to the positive question, and about the
same percentage didn't give a substantive answer to the negative
question. This is in large part because the majority of Republicans have
no specific thoughts about the best thing about a Clinton presidency,
and a majority of Democrats do not have specific responses to the
question about the worst aspects of a Clinton presidency.

In other words, a lot of Republicans cannot dream up a single upside
to having Hillary Clinton in the White House, and a lot of Democrats
cannot fathom a single drawback. Step up your game, electorate!

Oh, if only the people who responded to the Gallup poll knew what I knew! For I have been to the far-flung future year of 2017, and I do not have to imagine the best or most positive thing about a Hillary Clinton presidency--I know that the best thing about President Clinton's presidency is our contact with the aliens from Vega XIV in the Morbius Nebula! Thanks to Ms. Clinton's heroic efforts for our country, we will have the cure for seven different kinds of cancer! We will have agricultural miracles that end hunger throughout the world! We will have direct wireless connections to the Internet through our brains! And the Vegans have promised to give us their ultimate secret, thanks to the positive impression President Clinton made upon them: the ability to synthesize hydrogen nuclei from the quarks that spontaneously emerge from energy decay in the quantum foam, and to assemble those nuclei into more complicated atoms and then into molecules, rendering scarcity obsolete!

The best thing about a Clinton presidency was--I'm sorry, will be--that she is the greatest human being in all of history.

No! No, no, no! If only the version of myself from the past/future who responded to the Slate writer who responded to the Gallup poll asking the stupid hypothetical question had known what I know! For I have been to the far-flung future year of 2018, and I do not have to imagine the worst thing about a Clinton Presidency! She was/will be a fool! Deceived by the nefarious and evil monsters from Vega XIV in the Morbius Nebula! What they gave/will give with one floopy tentacle they took/will take away with another!

It is exactly like that old Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man": the Vegans won't be coming to help us, they'll be coming to farm us. They gave us the cure for seven cancers so we'll be healthy, and the Internet brains and quantum foam synthesizers so we'll be fat and happy and stupid--well-marbled meat for their roving abattoir tanks to scoop up and harvest. The streets have been awash in blood since the culling began! The President has disappeared, though we don't know if it's cowardice or if she was one of the first to be butchered and rendered up on a platter for the demonic hordes of aliens in their silver ships!

Doomed! We are doomed! People of America, when it comes time to elect one of the exactly two viable candidates presented for election, vote for the one who won't betray our entire species, even if he promises to repeal Obamacare and invade Iran!

I have been premature, I'm afraid. Because things were horrific, I assumed they were even worse than they were. Do not mistake me--it was awful, and five billion people will have died. But the best thing about a Clinton Presidency was not that she made a deal with the Vegans from the Morbius Nebula and it more than makes up for their inevitable betrayal.

In the year 2019, we had given up hope. Many human beings even willingly let themselves be slaughtered like cattle, roaming naked in the grasslands and mentally surfing Buzzfeed with their psychic wifi links. But then she came, like a goddess, a savior--yes, her, President Clinton.

We do not know if she became the heaven-sent, celestial creature who redeemed us from the Vegans simply by the mastery of the quantum foam synthesizers, or whether she gained some kind of aid from a Vegan splinter group, guilty for what their kind had wrought in turning this blue planet into a bloody red dot. But Hillary Clinton emerged from the rubble a divine cyborg, spiritually and intellectually linked to all of us via the direct-brain Internet connection. And she will be more than human, yes: forty feet tall, with interlinked biomechanical implants that can heal an entire army of her transcended human followers with antideath radiants while simultaneously bisecting a Vegan Orbship in lunar orbit with her isoquantum desiccator.

We will be a common personhood of humanity, the Singularity led by a gleaming womanmachine of hope and doom.

No! What was I thinking! She raised taxes in 2020!

To fight the Vegan reinforcements in 2021. I guess that's alright, then.

Look--there are clearly costs and benefits to the election of Hillary Clinton in the event she announces her candidacy, is nominated by her party, runs for President, and is elected in 2016. But don't think about it in terms of "she's a woman" or "she's a Democrat" or whatever her platform and proposed policies might be, because it won't matter; not because your only alternative will be Rand Paul (he narrowly wins the nomination over Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and [spoiler redacted]). You should vote for or against Hillary Clinton because in 2017, a fleet of alien starships will appear over every major city on Earth, the aliens will offer us presents, the aliens will betray us and turn us into food, and then we'll all become psychically uplinked to a giant robot who used to be Hillary Clinton and she'll save the human species. That's what matters.

Anything else is just, I dunno, like responding to a bafflingly stupid poll question about a hypothetical scenario with insufficient information or something.

>> Monday, March 24, 2014

Finally. It's about frickin' time. For more than a year, ever since Neil Young announced this "Pono" thingie, I've been wondering what the noise was about.

If you haven't been following, here's the deal: back in 2012, Neil Young made a mysterious announcement: not a new album, not a new film, not some other weird neilyoungian arthouse project; no, he announced that he was getting into the music player business, of all things. Young showed up on The Daily Show and in the music press with this little wedge-shaped doorstopper thing that he swore up and down would be the next greatest and latest thing in digital audio, something that would kick the pants off the MP3 (hardly high-hanging fruit, that) and usher in a new era in consumer sound. He even had at least one shill at last year's SXSW, a guy seated on a panel about the future of digital music I attended, who talked about how great Pono sounded in Neil Young's car.

And therein lay a great deal of frustration, because nobody--not Neil, not his flacks, not nobody--would say anything else about it beyond how fucking great it sounded in Neil Young's car. This was the one thing you could say about Pono from 2012 to this year's South-By (which I was sadly unable to attend): it sounds great in Neil Young's car. Dozens of musicians and musical eminences vouched for it as well, many of them appearing in the video Young put up on his Kickstarter site for Pono: it sounds great in Neil Young's car.

Well what the fuck is it, how does it work? It sounds great in Neil Young's car. What kind of codec or format does it use? It sounds great in Neil Young's car. Lossy or lossless? It sounds great in Neil Young's car. Compressed or uncompressed? It sounds great in Neil Young's car. Christ, can you give me even a hint of what kind of tech specs you people will be using? It sounds great in Neil Young's car. Fine, okay--can I take a ride in Neil Young's car? No.

It was impossible not to detect the whiff of snake oil coming from the back of the huckster's wagon. It doesn't mean a goddamn thing that something sounds great in Neil Young's car. Not just because I'm never going to get a chance to take a ride in Neil Young's car, either. First off, Neil Young's a goddamn guitar god, a goddamn living legend, and if I ever did get to sit down in Neil Young's car, a bitchslap from Neil Young would probably be the best goddamn bitchslap I ever took. Sure, sure, the Pono sounds great, Mr. Young, now will you autograph my forehead? There's a whole psychological component to musical enjoyment, and a shitty mixtape played on an off-brand boombox while you're making out with your high school crush may sound a helluva lot better than a live performance in the most precisely-engineered auditorium on Earth for obvious reasons. But even if you set that aside, what kind of sound system do you think Neil Young has in his car before he plugs in his demo Pono machine? I'm guessing it's not the factory speakers (though these days the factory standard stuff can be pretty damn good, with automakers licensing their systems from Blaupunkt, Fender, Bose, HK et al.).

But also, third, you know, who's going to be listening to this thing in Neil Young's car all the time? Just because it's perfectly engineered to provide the optimal Neil Young's car experience really doesn't tell me anything about how it's going to sound in my car, or in my living room, or through headphones while I'm bopping along in my local coffee shop or whatever.

Tech specs do. Specifically, telling me something about what kind of audio format you're using. Some data about your DAC might help, too. Although y'know, this is the thing about digital hardware these days: whether your DAC even matters depends on whether I'm plugging your gizmo into other gear via an audio cable (in which case your gizmo is doing the gruntwork) or whether I'm plugging it in via USB and treating your gizmo as a storage device when I'm at home (in which case my crap is doing the audio processing, and just reading the files from your doohickey).

Which is great. I like FLAC. I use FLAC a little, though not too much because my ears are shit and MP3 is a little more versatile even if it's a cruddy format. But maybe you already see the, I dunno if you'd call it a "problem", with Mr. Young's noise machine?

It's FLAC. I have FLACs. You might have FLACs. You can certainly get FLACs. You can buy FLACs. And you can play FLACs. On your computer, for sure, and probably on your phone (depends mostly on what kind of phone you're using), and maybe even on your digital audio player of choice (probably not your iPod, tho').

FLAC is lovely, but it's been around ages.

Don't get me wrong at all: if Neil Young and his audio experts weren't going to invent a new file format, FLAC was really their best choice for heaps and heaps of reasons. And if they were going to invent a whole new audio file format, it would raise the question, "Why didn't they just use FLAC?" FLAC is lossless, so it doesn't throw out bits and pieces of audio the codec thinks doesn't matter, the way MP3 and AAC do (for instance). FLAC is compressed, so it doesn't take up as much space on a drive as a WAV file and it uploads/downloads faster. (And FLAC is checksummed, which means it's actually a more reliable format than WAV.) And FLAC is open source, so you don't have to factor in licensing issues (i.e. fees) when retailing the music and players (e.g. your MP3 players, hardware and software alike, have a licensing fee to Fraunhofer buried somewhere in the retail price). So this is all good.

But it also pisses me off a little.

Because, you know, the whole thing about Pono was all this oogedy-boogedy business about how this would be a whole new thing in audio reproduction and how great it sounds in Neil Young's car, but the truth is they aren't really offering anything new (except maybe one thing that we'll come back to in a minute). Hell, if you go to their FAQ, they're still being kind of handwavy about the hardware component, offering useful technical info like, "The DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip being used is widely
recognized in the audio and engineering community as one of the best
sounding DAC chips available today," which, if you think about it, actually tells you nothing at all.

But they could hardly justify selling the thing for $400 if they actually owned up to the fact that you might be able to play the same files on your existing--and possibly superior--hardware. Or that you might already be able to play on your laptop or home computer. Or that the core software component is free.

No, the whole thing has been--again--all about how great the bloody thing sounds in the one place you or I will almost certainly never listen to it: in Neil Young's car.

So is the whole thing a waste? Mostly. There is one thing that Pono may be offering, that may be worth a look-see. And that is the fact that quite a lot of existing digital masters are shit but one of Pono's components is an online store offering "Pono certified" downloads. That is, if Pono is going to have musicians and engineers sitting down to remaster the original studio tapes for FLAC, Pono's music store may offer customers better mixes. This has nothing to do with Pono magic or Neil Young's car or anything like that. You may remember that back in the day, a lot of CDs sounded like crap because the labels often took xth generation analog masters that had been made for cutting vinyl or for for duplicating onto cassette, ran them through a DAC, and told consumers that the shittiness was because digital's "higher resolution" would sometimes "reveal" limitations and deficiencies in the "source" recordings. And then sometimes, if the artist involved was somebody big like Pink Floyd or Dire Straits, they'd actually get someone--maybe an engineer who worked closely with the band (e.g. James Guthrie for the Pink Floyd remasters) or maybe the original artist (I think, though I may be mistaken, Mark Knopfler came into the studio to oversee the Straits reissues)--to take whatever was in the vaults and actually turn it into a legitimate original digital master, and make a big deal about the remastered or reissued series. Well, same thing. Hopefully, maybe. This angle is very dependent on how much trouble the labels want to put themselves to and how much they think they can get out of selling special "Pono Editions" of their catalogues, naturally; and in some cases, frankly, it's going to make zero difference because there are already properly mastered FLACs directly available from the artist (e.g. Trent Reznor has made much of Nine Inch Nails' catalogue available in FLAC directly via the band's website) or through sites like HDtracks.

(I guess the only question I have about that, though, is whether audio engineers will be given access to Neil Young's car so they can set up a mixing board in the backseat or wherever is most appropriate for remixing an album to the demanding audio environment of Mr. Young's hoopty. "The fact is," one imagines James Guthrie saying, "The Wall is not going to sound the same in your living room at a modest listening volume as it will cranked to the max in Neil Young's car. And Neil Young's car is the definitive baseline by which the Pono experience is measured. I've got to tell you, I am really, really excited by how The Wall sounds in Neil's car, now. The groupie at the beginning of 'One Of My Turns' sounds like she's in the backseat, leaning up in-between the front seats to give directions or add something to a McDonald's drive-thru order. And, let me tell you, Dark Side of the Moon with the windows up is just unbelievable when the heater's running at, like, '3' with the outside vents closed. You won't believe it. Especially if you're in Neil Young's car.")

Anyway. So there's that. Maybe. Better remastering is always a good thing.

>> Thursday, March 20, 2014

This guy is dead. At least that's the news. Maybe it's a premature report of his demise, but it's probably true.

We won't name him by name. Not because his name has any kind of power, like Voldemort's in the Harry Potter books, but because his name has publicity, which is what his grubby little organization was all about. There were even suggestions that his org's extreme behavior was a kind of performance art thing designed to generate income via lawsuits: show up at a funeral, provoke someone into doing something rash, sue the victim for losing his head, profit. Nothing to do with Biblical principles or whatnot. Seems to have worked in at least one case, though. Publicity was always a part of that.

(I think we used to have a clever pseudonym for these people floating around, but I can't remember what it was. Oh well.)

Starving them for publicity, anyway, is probably as good as starving them for money. We won't mention names because, actually, yeah, naming does empower them. Not empower them over us, but empowers them from the shadow-statehood of being a morally bankrupt and culturally irrelevant parasite. Whether they're brigands or really just bigots, let them do it in their cavern.

We hear that the dead guy was excommunicated from the shadow org some time ago: how does that happen? Did they disagree over legal strategies? Did someone actually believe their own horseshit? Who knows? Who cares?

The late great comedienne Moms Mabley once did a bit about an ex-husband where she quipped, "They say you shouldn't say nothin' about the dead unless it's good. He's dead--good!" It springs to mind for obvious reasons.

You wonder who's going to mourn someone like this. Some of his family abandoned him and his organization, then his organization abandoned him. And it isn't like there will be more flattering obituaries than the one I'm writing, that refuses to identify him by name, even. A lot of people will be glad he's gone and the rest seem unlikely to care.

And will anyone show up at his funeral to make a scene? Maybe, because some people will consider it too obvious a piece of poetic justice to resist. And yet, what will that do but draw attention to him one final time? It would be better (tho' this won't happen, either) to put him in an unmarked piece of ground, or to leave him naked in a wood to be torn to pieces by crows and foxes and recycled into the soil (if anything would grow in the place he lay and festered). It would be better to take away not just this horrid little man's pestilential name but as much of his having-ever-existed as we could reclaim. Certainly not an active memory-holing: no need to resort to Stalinist extremes of Photoshopping the dead man out of vacation photos; but an obfuscation by dust and amnesia, an actual forgetting of the little blighter.

There are some evil men you make a point of remembering just in case there's such a thing as reincarnation, actual or merely figurative. Banal evil men like Richard Nixon and epically evil knaves like Adolf Hitler. This nameless twit we have come to neither praise nor bury is nowhere along that continuum: evil, yes--he parasitized suffering and grief, and what else is that but evil?--but not someone we should worry our pretty little heads about remembering for the next time. Anyway, we'll know his miserable heirs by the signs they carry to some other funeral. (Or, perhaps, even to his. Snakes have no loyalty, their brains are too small and their blood too cold for it.) His death is nothing but a chapter closing in a book in which he was never a major character and has long since passed from being an important minor one.

Naturally, if there's a Hell, he's in it. But so what? He'd be a nuisance there, too.

In the dead dwarf's country, one third of the states--seventeen of fifty--and the nation's capital have legalized same-gender marriages one way or another. This is a transformation that would have been inconceivable when I was young, an era in which merely being outted could end a career in entertainment, sports or politics and at the very least damaged one's reputation in other fields. Celebrities are mostly candid about their sexualities; those who remain coy only do so in a flirty, "What are you really asking and who wants to know?" manner instead of responding with the raw angry panic and speed-dialing of attorneys and agents that one used to see. Unfamous folks post pictures of their significant others on Facebook, live with them, and (in the seventeen states and District of Columbia) wed them.

The dwarf is losing, in other words; the dwarf has lost. A tide turned and washed him away. It is possible he died of obsolescence. Not that there aren't hateful, awful, tiny people still around who will post tinny little echoes of the dwarf's infamous catchphrase in Twitter posts and Sunday brunch conversations; it's just that fewer and fewer people take them so seriously anymore. A tide doesn't quite wash away clean: it leaves little puddles behind that dry out, shrivel, shrink and are gone, the wet slimy things that flopped about in the receding muck turning white and crusty with salt and their own desperation.

I don't believe in Hell, myself. I believe when you're dead, you're dead, and that's it; except, of course, that there's still your memory around, the echo of who you hopefully were that everyone carries around with them for however long, and one hopes one leaves behind a dulcet echo that chimes for a thousand years, passed from chamber to chamber by people who remember you well and with love. I don't see this dead guy meriting such a fate; I see his memory being a sharp, jarring, cacophonous sound that echoes only as long as people can be bothered to dance on his grave. And then when that exhilaration wanes, well: he'll be an answer to a trivia question, at best. A brief sentence in the comprehensive history of how love won out over insecurity and prejudice.

I wrote earlier that if there was a Hell, he'd be in it, but if there was a Hell, that isn't where I'd want him to be: I'd want the miserable little bastard to be a bodiless ghost wandering the streets and alleys of this America, watching his fool's crusade whispering off like the empty candy wrappers whisking through his feet, listening in vain for someone to remember his name or even that he ever was.

>> Friday, March 07, 2014

Re: Important Notification.6.7

‏

I'm Dr. George Lawrence Mensa, the General
Manager of Hsbc Bank. We wish to urgently confirm from you if actually
you know one Mrs. Jeanne White who claims to be your business
associate/partner.

Kindly reconfirm this application put in by
Mrs. Jeanne White - she submitted the under listed bank account
information supposedly sent by you to receive the funds on your behalf.

The bank information she applied with are stated thus:

Account Name: Jeanne White

Bank name: Citi Bank NA

Bank address: #1230 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA

Account Number: 013439887655

Routing Number: 2771722

Swift Code: CITIUS30

The
said Mrs. Jeanne White is claiming to this office that you are dead and
have Instructed that all relevant documentation/Information regarding
your Payment/Transfer, be changed to her as the beneficiary of the
payment short-listed among the foreign beneficiaries entitled to receive
their payment.

For your Information, our Government have
approved the total amount of EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED
STATES DOLLARS ONLY, in your favor, prior to the Federal Government
instructions/mandate to offset all outstanding payments to the various
legal foreign beneficiaries around the world and your payment file was
affected. We need to confirm from you if it's really true that you are
dead as made mention by your Associate.

You should note that, if
we do not hear from you; we automatically assume that you are actually
dead and the information passed to us by Mrs. Jeanne White is correct.
Hence, you are hereby requested to reply this Email immediately for
confirmation, before we proceed with this payment and for us to know the
true position of things with you so we won't make any mistakes/errors
in remitting your out-standing payment to a wrong

person/account.

Lastly,
If she's not authorized by you to claim your funds, then be advised to
reply back this email with your full information as required below for
re-confirmation.

Full name....................................

Direct telephone number......................

Address......................................

Age..........................................

Occupation...................................

Country.....................................

Bank name....................................

Bank address.................................

Bank account.................................

Account type.................................

Your quick response will help us a lot.

Yours, Sincerely,

Dr. George Mensa.

Dear Dr. Mensa,

Words cannot begin to express my outrage at the outright fraud being
perpetrated here. I am grateful, of course, that you've brought this
vital matter to my attention, that I may attempt to correct it before
things get any more out-of-hand than they already are. This is a
travesty, and I demand that all proper and necessary steps be taken to
address this injury and insult to my interests.

It is impossible for me to wrap my head around the fact you're even
having to address this matter to me, personally. I would have thought
it was utterly obvious what is going on here. I would have thought any
decent human being in the world would have seen all of the red flags
raised here and directly addressed the problem. I must conclude, then,
that someone here is a fool, or thinks that I am.

Fine, then. Let's get this over with. You know as well as I do, Dr.
Mensa, that your government owes me EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND
UNITED STATES DOLLARS AND THIRTY-FIVE CENTS.

"EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS ONLY," you write in your missive. "ONLY"?! Hardly. Hardly "only". You owe me EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS AND THIRTY-FIVE CENTS. I shouldn't have to point out the profound difference between EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS AND THIRTY-FIVE CENTS and EIGHT MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS ONLY. You know as well as I do, or you wouldn't have had to add the qualifier.

There are some people out there who might become cognizant of our
dispute and wonder, "Eight-and-a-half million dollars is a lot of
money--is thirty-five cents that big of a deal?" These people are, of
course, cretins. We have a small thing in this world called
"civilization", and this thing, this civilization, is a thing of laws
and principles, a thing of ethics, something your government, Dr.
Mensa, has lost sight of. Without laws, principles and ethics, we are
nothing but animals. Animals who have airplanes and nuclear bombs and
reality television, yes, but take away those things and tell me you can
distinguish one of us from a baboon. Without looking at the ass, I
mean. Obviously, baboons have a red ass and humans often don't, but I
think you see my point. A chimpanzee could pilot an unmanned drone deep
into the heart of an ostensibly neutral country and fire its payload of
heavy explosives at a civilian funeral as well as any human could,
although you might have to install some kind of microchip in his brain
or something, but would he do it ethically? We are told that a
million monkeys, sitting at a million typewriters for a million years
would inevitably some day type up the complete works of William
Shakespeare: I say, that sure would be something to see, though I hope
there's somebody who comes through and cleans up the vast mountains of
monkeyshit that would accumulate far more quickly than the Bard's
immortal words. The point of the observation being, of course, that the
difference between William Shakespeare and a million monkeys is that
Shakespeare had principles, never actually used a typewriter because Mr.
Typewriter wouldn't be born until many centuries after Bacon's death,
and Shakespeare only wore a diaper as an adult that one time and he
never it did again after Queen Elizabeth chastised him (something she
never would have done to a million monkeys, because she would've
immediately seen the necessity of making sure the monkeys didn't leave
feces all over the whole of Europe like a bunch of Spaniards).

Q.E.D., Dr. Mensa. Q.E.D.

As for Ms. White, my dear friend: yes, I know her quite well, and she
has correctly represented my interests as posthumously directed, for I
am, indeed, dead, as she so correctly informed you. She is, in point of
fact, quite well aware of my demise as I have it on good authority she
was present at my autopsy, where she repeatedly asked the Medical
Examiner if he really thought my cause of death was heart failure when
the only part of my body recoverable for my exam was the charred
and mangled end of my left arm from just below the shoulder to (three
of) my fingertips, recovered from a swimming pool many miles from where
several hundred survivors observed a rather large and frightening
explosion.

It is, of course, not my place to argue with science, least of all
science articulated by a gentleman with such an undeniably fine
doctoring moustache as the Medical Examiner's, which is either waxed or
oiled, and which frames a marvelously well-manicured Van Dyke. (Indeed,
I am given to understand that this Van Dyke has led to all the Medical Examiners in the world declaring our local Medical Examiner their true liege lord and king of their faerie realm.)
Thus I regret to inform you of my death by heart failure. Our Ms.
White's information is absolutely genuine and correct, and she has full authorization to act on my behalf.

But surely you already knew that. I mean, she showed you the arm,
right? She was supposed to show you the arm. And wave it at you and
hit you with it if you tried to cheat her out of my thirty-five cents
like you obviously tried to do.

I would like to be absolutely clear on this point: I am not prepared to
be reasonable about this thirty-five cents nor do I see why I ought to
be. It is, as stated previously, a matter of principle. And principal,
but not interest, though it ought to be and I'm obviously interested in
my thirty-five cents. I will have my whole sum or I will have
nothing. I may be dead, but it hasn't affected my sense of right and
wrong. (Mostly just my sense of direction, as I no longer have
semicircular canals. Or eyes. Really, I'm just basically an arm at
this point, or most of one. Most of a dead arm.) I will not be
cheated: I deserve thirty-five cents, and I will have thirty-five
cents. At this point, frankly, the thirty-five cents is probably more
important than the eight million, five hundred thousand dollars, because
we agree on the eight million, five hundred thousand dollars; but as to
the thirty-five cents, I am right and you are wrong and I will be vindicated. Don't even think I won't be.

I realize that a business matter between gentlemen would normally be
pursued in private correspondence between the parties, but I am
publishing this as an open letter so as to let the whole entirety of the
world know what cheap and rotten chiselers you are. A country that
would take advantage of a disembodied, burned and (if we must be frank
about all our faults for the sake of fairness) rather
past-its-"sell-by"-date arm is a country lacking in decency and honor.
(As to that last bit, it's basically a figure of speech, because really
nobody would buy a charred and disfigured arm even if it were fresh. If
you're looking to procure arms, you really want to go with something
that hasn't been set on fire and catapulted several miles to land in a
swimming pool where it bobbed around a bit for several days, which
wouldn't have happened if someone cleaned the pool more often, but
possibly I digress at this point.) You should be ashamed, Dr. Mensa, ashamed. A man with a medical moustache and no principles, what kind of man is that? It probably isn't that good a moustache to begin with--yes, this is an unfair attack adcapillum,
but what can a man expect when he's siding with villains, cheats and
knaves who would deny a man what's due him? (He can expect to have his
moustache insulted. Just in case you didn't see where I was going with
that.)

The list of your treacheries seems endless. You would cheat a man of
his thirty-five cents. You'd hassle a bereaved and grief-stricken
woman. You'd rob an unarmed man. What chicanery might be next?
Kicking an orphan? Leaving a burning bag of poo on a blind nun's
doorstep? Hamster-baiting? Vile iniquity! Iniquitous vileness!

You, sir, shall be hearing from my attorneys. As soon as they finish typing Troilus and Cressida and their handlers change them.

>> Thursday, March 06, 2014

I like Digby's Hullabaloo, and I like Digby's brother-in-arms, David Atkins, who posts as "thereisnospoon". So I have Hullabaloo in my Dashboard feed and regularly pop over to see what they're saying. Usually good stuff, which is why it's not just disappointing but also kind of awkward and embarrassing and even a little painful when one of them manages to say something numbingly stupid and wrong.

Case in point today: Atkins has a post up today, "Let's play a game: libertarian professor of economics, or crazy man on street corner?", pointing out some stupid and cruel things that have been written by Professor Bryan Caplan, who (spoiler) is evidently not a crazy man on a street corner, but rather is a Professor of Economics at George Mason. (I make certain assumptions here, clearly: "libertarian professor of economics" and "crazy man on street corner" are obviously not mutually exclusive, and for all I know Professor Caplan moonlights as a crazy man on a street corner, or perhaps even vice-versa. Indeed, given the beliefs and protestations of many extremist libertarians, one might even suspect Professor Caplan doubles as both Professor and crazy man on street corner every time he comes to intersecting streets.)

Caplan appears to be a fan of the usual anarcho-libertarian pathological fetishes re: forcing strangers to pay for things they don't want. E.g., in one piece, he writes:

However, the fact that a person deserves his poverty is (a) a strong
moral reason to give him low priority when weighing how to allocate
help, and (b) a strong moral reason not to force a stranger to help him.

That all government is basically a mechanism to force people to take care of strangers probably hasn't passed Caplan by, but the realization that this is actually necessary for human beings to have things like, you know, civilization, apparently hasn't penetrated. There may or may not be any particular reasons for me to care whether Professor Caplan's home is burned to the ground by the Unreconstructed Godless Castroites (UGC), but whether or not I care, my taxes pay for a military that keeps the UGC from cruising up the coast to the Chesapeake Bay, navigating the Potomac to the capitol, and committing acts of vicious arson against capitalist running dogs before disappearing into the night. (Note for the record that sailing up the coast to the Chesapeake and navigating up the Potomac will still leave one many, many hours' drive from my neighborhood. It may or may not be a free country, but it's certainly a big country. One where dreams stay with you--oh, never mind.)

Professor Caplan might well retort that as goes the beams and roof of a capitalist running dog, so will go those of a small-barrel-bourbon socialist's (doesn't have the ring of champagne socialist, but I can hardly afford champagne). But of course the same argument could be applied to helping the poor and sickly, if Caplan cared about rigorous logical consistency more than he cared about his tax bracket: aside from all the moral reasons for which one might want a strong social safety net--reasons I find compelling enough, but that clearly don't impress Professor Caplan very much--it shouldn't be too hard to notice that throughout history the most consistently-found leading cause of bloody revolt, pandemic plague and civil collapse has been economic disparity. People who have a stake in civil government have no reason to rebel against it. States that invest in the health of their poor--providing them with housing codes and sanitation, f'r'instance--suffer more rarely from disease outbreaks and weather them better. Et cetera. The moral argument is certainly nicer than the rational-self-interest argument for a strong government that has the funding to support and protect its constituents, but that doesn't mean the rational-self-interest argument is absent.

Indeed, although no one likes much to admit it, the rational-self-interest argument has been the more compelling argument over the course of human history. I don't mean to imply that wealthy big government regulatory types like the Roosevelt cousins weren't insensitive or heartless: people do things for lots of reasons, and I'm sure Teddy and Franklin were motivated to some degree by things like compassion and noblesse oblige and whatnot. But d'ya really think the rise of a stronger Federal regulatory regime during the first half of the Twentieth Century had everything to do with bleeding hearted suckers waking up one morning full of Christmas cheer and love for mankind and nothing to do with the fact anarchists and labor radicals were throwing bombs at textile mills, shooting up shoe factories, marching in the streets and generally making a nuisance of themselves? I don't effing think so. We got serious liberal reforms in the Twentieth Century in large part because the wild west, laissez-faire, business-is-business, anything goes cesspool of late Nineteenth Century America created a situation in which a lot of poor and sick people were justifiably enraged that nobody cared about burning seamstresses and buried miners, and got angry, vocal and violent enough that a lot of very rich men started noticing they had an incipient French Revolution on their hands and rammed through a lot of legislation that not only benefited the poor, but not-at-all-coincidentally placated them, too.

Which brings us to another item on Caplan's list of inanity: he writes, "Like it or not, much-maligned U.S. Gilded Age poverty policies--minimal government assistance combined with near-open borders--were close to ideal." Ah yes: well, logically, then, we'd still have those policies if they worked, yes? This being a representative democracy and all, no doubt everybody looked around and said, "Why did some smartass call this the 'Gilded' Age--it's a Golden Age, goddammit! Respect!" and then they all voted in the same people who were responsible and paid no heed to all the horrible socialists and progressives running around whining about nothing.

Of course, that isn't what happened at all. Pointing this fact out is hardly a naturalistic fallacy, it's merely an explanation: it's not that things ought to be the way they ended up, it's that they ended up this way because the Gilded Age was a colossal failure as a social experiment and America basically went tits-up, or started to, so people started trying other ways of governing (with varying degrees of success or lack thereof). The Gilded Age was petty, corrupt, tyrannical, filthy, sick, and ugly, to such a point people felt obligated to try everything from amending the Constitution to zealously shooting a fat man in the gut to fix it, replace it, or obliterate it from history.

Describing the Gilded Age as "much-maligned" carries with it a whiff of imputed slander--an implication that the Gilded Age is wrongly impugned or misunderstood; folks, the Gilded Age is "much-maligned" because it deserves to be. For crying out loud, it was such a terrible epoch in American affairs, they called it "The Gilded Age". At the time. To its face. In public. The mere name was a snarky insult. And the era didn't have the wherewithal to fight back because it had no excuse for itself in the very day, so what kind of schmuck do you have to be to try to make an excuse for it now?

So it's all well and good for David Atkins at Hullabaloo to give Professor Caplan's thoughts wider exposure so we can all point and laugh and call him a tool. This is all well and good. This is exactly why we have freedom of speech and a marketplace of ideas and so on. Which is why it is just utterly appalling that Atkins wraps up his piece with this:

This nutcase is actually teaching impressionable students economics of all things, and getting published in all the big papers.

This is part of why we can't have nice things. A person this morally
insane and ignorant of both history and economics shouldn't be anywhere
near a classroom or a publishing house.

And then my head hits the desk. Seriously, Atkins? You're going there? You're making the same total tool argument people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh make whenever they get in a twist about the state of academe?

Way to carry the ball into our own end zone, buddy. Thanks for nothing.

The nicest thing we have, or one of them anyway, is that a person as morally insane and ignorant of history and economics as Professor Caplan can get his ideas into general circulation, whereupon those of us who, say, took a History class in college at some point can say, "Whoooooa--hang on there, pardner," and pick him to pieces. Thereby reminding others of history and economics and common sense and logic and whatever else they may have learned and forgotten, and/or educating those who managed to sleep through the day some poor harassed TA blew through the Progressive movement or the history of organized labor before 1940.

Nor is it necessarily a bad thing he's teaching "impressionable" college students. Like everyone else, I had great professors and lousy ones, and sometimes the lousy ones are the ones who made me think the most; sometimes the lousy ones were even the ones I learned the most from, generally in spite of themselves. Learning, you know, isn't just being able to regurgitate alleged facts during final exams and trivia nights at the local watering hole: learning is also about being able to think, cross-link, critique and challenge. Getting into classroom arguments with idiots who happened to have advanced degrees despite being idiots was frequently educational. Of course, there were fellow-students in some classes who complained that students arguing with a professor kept the professor from telling them what would be on the mid-term; but those students, as uninterested in discourse as they might be, weren't even present and aware enough to be called "impressionable", I think--calling them "impressionable" implies they remembered enough of the professor's nonsense to recall it after finals, much less believe in it.

Thoughtful students, whether they publicly call out Professor Caplan on his home turf or not, are perfectly capable of recognizing that Caplan's ideas are out of step with other classes they took, books they read, and everyday experience. Less-thoughtful students were likely damned to begin with: if his classes are like his blog posts, anyone who walks away "persuaded" most likely walked in already in agreement and hopeless.

If Atkins were to write that Caplan has no business in government, I'd most likely agree. He has no business drafting legislation, for instance, or overseeing regulations. But the academy? The university is exactly where a well-informed idiot belongs. He can exchange words with other people, who hopefully aren't idiots, and everyone can listen and work out whatever vital truths can be filtered out of the flow back and forth. Hell, even if his interlocutors are idiots, the university is still the proper forum, giving students the opportunity to listen to a pair of idiots and realize it, and work something out themselves.

For Athena's sake, publish Caplan in the big papers, and put him in front of a classroom, and give him a blog that David Atkins can link to, that I may throw 1,888 pointed darts at Caplan and his ilk, and that my aim be true!

The Proprietor...

R. Eric VanNewkirk is sometimes a writer, occasionally a photographer, used to play guitar privately-but-seriously, an attorney by trade. Always freezes up when tasked to write something for a profile box. Progressive, opinionated, obnoxious. Drinks pricey tequila. Loves his cat. Strange sense of humor. Nerd, geek. Gregarious yet painfully shy. Reads a good bit. Doesn't watch much TV. Gets most of his news online. Has never been outside the solar system. An atheist, unless dabbling in Ninkasi worship counts for something. Doesn't know how to finish this box.